Egypt’s Army, Hardened in Bureaucracy, Not War

July 18 (Bloomberg) -- The Egyptian army has come forth to
save democracy by destroying it. A man in uniform, Abdelfatah
al-Seesi, gave himself the right to oust and hold in detention
an elected president. Say what you will about the Free Officers
who toppled the monarchy in 1952, they had been men of their
time. They had known political protest, and they had known war.

Gamal Abdel Nasser had imbibed the political currents of
his time. He had fought and fought well in the war for
Palestine. He had carried within him the grievance of a military
that had been dispatched into a war it wasn’t prepared to fight.

As for Anwar Sadat, he had known the life of the street. He
had taken part in the assassination of an ancien regime
politician known for his sympathy for the British occupation; he
had been cashiered from the army, knew adversity and had been
imprisoned. All of the hopes -- and frustrations of Egypt --
were to be found in the men who went out on July 23, 1952, to
upend the monarchy.

Abdelfatah al-Seesi is a product of a different army and a
different world. He is a man of the barracks, and the
commissaries and business interests, of the officer corps. He
graduated from the military academy in 1977; he would rise in
the armed forces in a time of peace. He has known no combat; he
served as a military attache in Saudi Arabia, and attended the
U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania.

There is nothing remarkable about al-Seesi; he is said to
be religiously devout. It was President Mohamed Mursi himself
who chose him as commander of the armed forces, promoting him
over 200 more senior officers. This is no Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
emerging out of war and national distress.

Craven Coup

A craven civilian leadership that had been unable to trump
the Muslim Brotherhood at the ballot box was glad for the gift
of his coup. It is a “hiccup,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, the
darling of liberals abroad, of the coup. ElBaradei had a front-row seat, as the new military master issued the declaration that
ousted Mursi. And the needed religious cover was at hand: the
grand sheikh of Al-Azhar and the Coptic pope. Tribute had to be
paid to the street -- or more precisely to Tahrir Square -- and
representatives of the Tamarod (Rebellion) movement who had
gathered the petitions that called for an end to the Mursi
presidency were present, too.

In truth, there was no urgency to the coup. Mursi wasn’t
about to run away with the republic. The man reigned but didn’t
rule. The police were a law unto themselves, the judiciary was
defiant, and the army was untouchable.

The issues of war and peace -- the accommodation with
Israel, the traffic with the U.S. -- were beyond Mursi’s writ.
The intelligence services were supreme in their own domains. The
deep state that Hosni Mubarak had bequeathed was intact.

True, Mursi had secured the passage of a constitution last
December, and 64 percent of the voters had given their approval.
But countries don’t live by constitutions, and the ratified
constitution was in the main an anodyne document with the
boilerplate provisions of prior declarations. This land had
never been governed by constitutional provisions. Successive
regimes have lived and functioned outside the law, and the
pharaonic leadership at the helm needed no validating
constitutional mechanisms.

The true powers in the land could have permitted Mursi the
full run of his four-year mandate. The country could have dealt
with it. But the land was set on the boil, and the coup was the
easy way out.

Egypt has been perennially prone to violent shifts of
opinion and preferences. It makes political deities and breaks
them: Its broad middle class has been brittle and given to
superstition and conspiracy theories. Modernism has been on the
defensive for decades now, and the country has been bereft of
the saving graces of participatory politics.

Secularists Rule

After tyranny came an infatuation with the maximalism of
rebellion. Moderation quit the land. An unknown military officer
was now the redeemer. The national maladies will endure. There
is no way the roots of the Muslim Brotherhood could be
extirpated.

But the secularists now wanted the old, burdened country to
be theirs and theirs alone. The newly formed cabinet is composed
of ministers of a decidedly secular bent. Some retreads from the
Mubarak era have found their way into the new government.

Augusto Pinochet was a cruel and wicked man, the aftermath
of his coup against Salvador Allende a time of merciless
official terror. But grant Pinochet his due: He assumed the
responsibility of his power and he remade the economy. By the
early signs, General al-Seesi intends to rule behind the facade
of civilian power. He can be forgiven the sense that the crowd -
- all those good secularists and self-styled liberals -- had
pined for his rule.